


How Doc Holliday Got His Hat Back

by likethenight



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Doc Holliday versus the internet, Gen, One Shot, Waverly Earp is a delight, or indeed of a very long life, the downsides of immortality, there are some things you can't get online
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 09:04:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13361235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: You wouldn’t think it would be this difficult to replace a hat, even an original 1880s John B Stetson black felt cowboy hat.





	How Doc Holliday Got His Hat Back

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to a post on Tumblr about the down-sides of being immortal, one of them being the impossibility of replacing a beloved item of clothing once it wears out because the technique of its manufacture has been lost. Which doesn't quite apply to Doc and his hat, but it made me think of him anyway. 
> 
> I am between rewatchings of season 2 and can't remember whether or not we're shown how he regains his hat midway through the season, but this is my take on how it might have happened...

You wouldn’t think it would be this difficult to replace a hat, even an original 1880s John B Stetson black felt cowboy hat. Especially in this day and age, the day and age in which John Henry Holliday finds himself, when it seems anything the human brain can imagine can be ordered from the internet at the touch of a button and delivered the very next day. Henry has only the very vaguest conception of what “the internet” is, mind you; mostly he tends to think of it as a gigantic warehouse containing absolutely everything one could dream up, connected to everywhere in the world by thousands and thousands of telegraph wires. 

So you’d think he’d be able to find a replacement hat easily enough. It was simplicity itself back in his day; all one needed to do was walk into a hat shop, choose whichever hat took your fancy, perhaps try on a few in front of the silvered mirror on the counter, and pay the shopkeeper for it before stepping back out into the street, your head adorned with the very finest hat your hard-earned money could buy.

Nowadays, it seems, there is no such thing as a hat shop, at least not in somewhere as small and god-forsaken as Purgatory, and Henry is not at all enamoured of the idea of travelling to a bigger city to try and find one there - if he can even leave the Ghost River Triangle. He was never over-clear on the specifics of Constance Clootie’s spell, but his car certainly refused to leave, the one time he tried it. Of course, it had formerly been her car, so the good Lord alone knows what strange and terrible magic might have permeated its workings. So for now at least he is confined to Purgatory, and whatever else its somewhat doubtful charms, it does not contain a hat shop. The army surplus store where Wynonna managed to get herself taken hostage early in their acquaintance stocks hunting caps and woollen hats for the winter, fur-lined hats and waxed affairs for keeping the rain off, but nothing even remotely suitable for the purposes of Doc Holliday. The grocery store has cheap baseball caps and more woollen hats for winter, but nothing else, and the farmers’ supplies store on the edge of town also has hunting hats and waxed hats and fur-lined trappers’ hats, along with a few inferior quality cowboy hats. But no original 1880s John B Stetson hats of the type Doc requires.

He eventually enlists Waverly’s help with searching the myriad purveyors of headwear residing upon the internet, but none of the possibilities she finds are suitable either. She tries searching for ‘original 1880s John B Stetson cowboy hat’, but all they get are illustrations and examples and nobody actually selling one. Then she tries dropping the ‘original 1880s’ to see if that will cast a wider net, but still they have no luck; Waverly drops the ‘John B’ next, but all that gets them is a far wider net and no darn fish. The closest they can get, it seems, is inferior felt or leather cowboy hats for dimwitted yahoos like Waverly’s former boyfriend, that empty-headed idiot Champ Hardy. Which is not the same thing at all. Doc’s hat was made from heavyweight black felt, painstakingly steamed and formed until it took on that perfect shape. It certainly was not a hat like any of these that Waverly is showing him, leather or otherwise. There do seem to be an awful lot of cheap fancy-dress cowboy hats out there, too, made of thin felt or stiffened cloth or even cardboard. It is most frustrating.

“You’re so picky,” Waverly complains, but she’s smiling that sparky, charming smile of hers and Doc cannot bring himself to be offended.

“It’s important,” he says. “A gentleman of my reputation cannot be seen in unsatisfactory attire. I have my social standing to consider.”

“You mean your image,” Waverly teases. “There’s hardly any such thing as social standing these days, especially in Purgatory. If you’re hanging out with the Earps, at least.”

“Very well, my image,” he shrugs, conceding the battle; it wasn’t one worth fighting, anyway. “I can hardly go around town in one of those “baseball cap” things, now can I? The type of individual with whom I do business would entirely lose all respect for me.”

He is being quite serious, but Waverly laughs that tinkling laugh of hers and keeps on clicking on the little clicking pad, opening more windows into more unsatisfactory hat stores.

“Well, no, that would _never_ do,” she says, just a little too much giggle in her voice. “This is getting ridiculous, though, are you sure none of these are right? There must be _someone_ selling genuine-Old-West hats out there somewhere. I’m kind of surprised Shorty never bought one for the bar. He was always so into the whole ‘drink where Wyatt Earp did!’ schtick. Good marketing and all that, brought the money in.”

“Well, maybe the reason he didn’t is that there ain’t one to be had,” says Doc, instinctively reaching up to resettle his non-existent hat and having to push his hair back instead, so as to have something to do with his raised hand besides putting it uselessly back down again. 

“It’s not as though Stetson aren’t making hats any more,” Waverly says. “They are, and they’re making hundreds of different sorts. Are you really sure none of them is right?”

“Quite sure. I will know it when I see it, and I have not seen it yet.”

“Fine,” Waverly sighs. “I’ll set up an eBay alert, then if someone lists an original 1880s John B Stetson black cowboy hat, eBay will send me an email and then you can decide if you want to bid for it. There must be some out there still.”

“Probably all in _collections_ ,” Doc grouses. He has never quite been able to reconcile himself to the idea that his own era is now the stuff of legend, all the things that he considered commonplace now displayed in museums and fought over by collectors, instead of out there in the world being used and loved. Because of course the world has moved on. It has other things to use and love, and most of them, in Doc’s considered opinion, are pure hokum. Although he will admit that telephones, especially those of the cell variety, are very useful. And automobiles. It is good not to have to rely on a horse, and to be able to travel further and faster than a horse could manage. But most of it is hokum.

“Well, you never know. Someone might find one in their great-grandmother’s attic or something. You’ll just have to be patient.”

“I have had more than enough of patience at the bottom of that well,” Doc points out, but he can’t see any way around it. Waverly is right.

“You could always try the antique store,” Waverly says suddenly. “I just thought of it. It’s right up at the other end of Main Street. The old guy who runs it is a bit weird, but I guess that probably comes with the territory.”

Doc isn’t sure whether she means the antiques, the far end of Main Street, or Purgatory itself by ‘the territory’. Truth be told, pretty much everyone in this middle-of-nowhere little town is at least a little bit weird. Many folks are a whole lot weirder than that, especially the sort of folks who frequent Shorty's Bar. Especially these days. Between the out-of-town tourist schmucks who want to drink where Wyatt Earp did, the local ne'er-do-wells and the outright strange individuals who've been drifting in since Doc took over the place from the departed and not at all lamented Bobo del Ray, the clientele at Shorty's is a pretty rarefied mix these days. 

In any case, this antiques store must be worth a try, even if Doc is having a little trouble with the idea that a hat the same as his own beloved Stetson would these days be classed as an antique. So he takes himself down to the far end of Main Street and gives the place the old once-over from across the way. He'd expected it to look dusty and forgotten, but it's actually pretty nice-looking. The word 'Antiques' is lettered in gold on the swinging wooden sign over the door, and again in a pleasing curve across the wide window, only slightly obscuring the view of the interior of the store. The window contains an eclectic display of items, glass vases cheek-by-jowl with a pair of silver pistols with ivory-inlaid grips, a porcelain-faced doll in a crinoline dress, a painting of a house not unlike the Earp homestead in the corner of a field. Doc crosses the street to take a closer look, pausing to appreciate a cushion of rings and brooches in the front and centre of the window. Not that he has any use for such things. Wynonna'd only laugh in his face if he tried buying her jewels, he knows that much.

There isn't much of the interior of the store visible from out here on the sidewalk, and Doc thinks he'd have noticed any threats if there were any, so he pushes the door open and steps inside, the bell jangling over his head. The place looks almost familiar, pleasingly like the stores he remembers from his old life, his first life: shelves of items for sale, a long counter across the back of the room with more shelves behind it and a door to the back room, and a shopkeeper behind the counter, an elderly man with long white hair in a ponytail at the nape of his neck, dressed immaculately in a three-piece suit with the chain of a pocket watch visible between the button and the pocket of his waistcoat. He offers Doc a friendly smile.

"Good afternoon, sir," he says. "Were you looking for anything in particular?"

"Well, as a matter of fact, I am. I am in search of a most particular hat. An original 1880s John B Stetson black felt cowboy hat, as it happens. Not a replica or an approximation. It has to be an original."

"An original, you say?" the man echoes. "Not many of those around these days. Something of a collector's piece."

"I'm aware," says Doc heavily. "This is a long shot. The internet doesn't seem to have one to offer."

"Ah well, not everything is available on the internet, even now," the man says with a note of amusement in his voice. "As it happens, you're in luck. I may have just the thing you're looking for." He steps around the counter into the store, making his way over to the far corner, where Doc now realises that there is a hat rack affixed high up on the wall. Taking a long wooden pole in his hand, the man reaches up and uses the pole to snag a particular hat off one of the hooks on the rack, lifting it down and carefully taking it from the pole and handing it to Doc. 

Doc's eyes widen as he takes in the detail of the hat, turning it over in his hands. This is indeed an original 1880s John B Stetson black felt cowboy hat, or as close to it as Doc has yet to see here in Purgatory, right down to the manufacturer's name in the sweatband. Something is written on the band, small letters that Doc has to squint to make out, and he lets out a low whistle when he sees that it is a carefully printed "J H H". 

"Well, I'll be damned," he says, and the shopkeeper smiles, putting his pole away. 

"The man who sold it to me swore that it stood for 'John Henry Holliday', and tried to charge me far more than what it was worth. But I stood my ground. He couldn't prove it, and neither can I. But it's a good story to tell, and it's great to think of. The great Doc Holliday, losing his hat up here in Purgatory, it does have a certain ring to it, don't you think?"

Doc snorts. He doesn't remember losing a hat up here, but then he wasn't always in full possession of his senses, all that time ago. He resists telling the man that he himself could prove the identity of the hat's former owner; that would just be far too hard to explain. Instead, he contents himself with asking the price.

"Seventy-five dollars, to you, sir," says the shopkeeper, and Doc has to bite his tongue not to tell him to go to hell; he thinks he will never become accustomed to the outrageously inflated prices in this brave new world, and judging by the prices of the low-quality imitations on the internet, he has in fact just managed to secure himself something of a bargain. 

"Seventy-five it is," he says, peeling the bills off the fold he keeps in his jacket pocket for just such an occasion and handing them over, then settling the hat onto his head. It fits, of course, like a glove - or indeed, like a hat which has found its owner again, or a head which has found its hat again. 

"It suits you very well," the shopkeeper says, "I had a feeling it would," and again Doc has to resist the temptation to tell him why. He settles for a half-smile and a nod instead.

"That it does," he says. "No other hat will do." And he tips it at the shopkeeper and takes his leave of him, jangling the bell above the door as he steps back out into the street. His own hat, somehow here in the last place he thought to look for it, across a century and a half. Who would have thought it?

Then again, if it was going to happen anywhere, Purgatory would probably be the most likely place for it. The supernatural has its claws caught deep in the flesh of this little town, and Doc supposes he should be thankful that for once it's chosen to turn up something good, instead of one aspect or other of the ravening hordes of hell.

He'll have to tell Waverly her long shot paid off. Once he's indulged himself by walking the length of Main Street wearing his new-old hat, of course, revelling in being able to tip it again if he passes a lady, to resettle it on his head if he feels the need, and to tilt it so that it shades his eyes from the sun and prying gazes. Doc Holliday has his hat back. Purgatory had better watch out.


End file.
